Abstract

Japan’s spectacular economic growth after 1945 made it a model for its neighbors and even, at the height of its economic dominance and hubris in the 1980s, an exemplar of modern capitalism for business leaders in the Americas, Europe, and Pacific Asia. By the early 1990s, however, the collapse of mammoth real estate and stock market bubbles launched the nation on two decades of stagnation or fitful growth, deflation, and soul searching. The hubris that drove the post-war era – that “we had all the answers” – had collapsed. And then, on 11 March 2011, the state’s ineffectual response to the triple-crises of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in northeastern Japan heightened popular debate over whether the nation was doomed to a slow decline or might yet be able to recover its vigor and discover a new path and new purposes.